How Do You Compute The Mean Deviation?
The “mean deviation” is a measure of how spread out or how concentrated a series of values is. You can think of it as finding the mean of the mean. Suppose you run a restaurant and have a 12-oz. New York strip steak on the menu. You cut your own steaks in-house and want them all to be close to 12 oz. Too light, and you are cheating the customer. Too heavy, and you are losing profit. The mean deviation will tell you if your steaks are consistently near 12 oz. Collect your data and find the mean. Using the steak example, you would cut a number of steaks, weigh them, add their weights together and divide this sum by the number of steaks you weighed. If you cut five steaks weighing 9.2 oz., 15.6 oz., 11.6 oz., 12.3 oz. and 14.1 oz., the sum would be 62.8 oz. Divided by 5, you would find their mean weight to be 12.56 oz. That’s the kind of mean you want. It is close to 12 oz. and is above it rather than below it. You will look like a generous restaurateur without sacrificing too much profit
